Sprint 1 is over - so now we are starting sprint 2! With a long list of animations, audio, visual effects and everything user-interface related, we still have quite a lot of tasks to get done in the next weeks... But we are off to an excellent start!

Art: General

Since all the main assets are in the game, our artists have finally had the time to decorate our world - both in and out of the museum. 

For the outside, they modeled and textured a sidewalk and street as the base, then added crosswalks, fire hydrants, benches, small and large bushes, and streetlights - which have spotlights to make them feel more realistic, and reinforce the fact that the game is happening during the night. 

And inside the museum itself, the improvements focused on putting in decorations (adding windows, curtains, benches, potted plants, painting spotlights), and improving textures for the walls, floor, and carpet )more details and increased the contrast, as the previous textures were barely visible due to the shader and lighting setup).

There will also soon be more different kind of loot in the game - an assortment of gems, a Viking helmet, a sword, and a bust!

The UI art is now in progress (and in the process of being put in the game! If you play the game, you should see some of it already in there).

As a quick extra, we introduced glass boxes that sit on top of pedestals and can now break, tying into the new breaking mechanic the programmers implemented this week.

Art: Animations

This week, we started creating our own animations — without relying on Mixamo! 

We kicked things off with a simple door animation. After working through the rigging and animation process in Maya — and dealing with countless glitches, errors, and crashes — we finally got the hang of it. Once we felt more confident, we moved on to a more complex task: animating the trashcan. We needed two animations here — one for when the raccoon jumps out (spawning/respawning) and another for when it sucks up loot. 

We also made progress on some smaller extra character animations. On top of that, we added a dust particle effect for object impacts — both between objects and between objects and their surroundings.

Programming: General

Since we implemented our main mechanics already, we decided to add some extra features to the game to make it a little more lively: laser traps and cameras that will react to the player, and alert the guard that there is a thief that needs catching. Aside from that, this past week the programmer tasks have largely focused on integrating art assets with the code, fixing bugs (including our very own Skyrim physics bug), and adding a pause function to the game - along with a pause menu, so you can continue the game, check controls, or quit to main menu.